IsoHunt Shuts Down Early To Stop Archive Team From Recording Important Historical Information

from the that's-unfortunate dept

With last week's announcement that IsoHunt was shutting down, the famed "Archive Team" apparently sprung into action to try to preserve the information on the site. As you hopefully know, the Archive Team works hard to preserve important information that has historical relevance and importance. For example, it preserved much of GeoCities after that site was shut down. If you don't understand, preserving historical information is extremely important in an age where such information can disappear entirely.

Unfortunately, perhaps because of legal fears, IsoHunt's Gary Fung apparently decided that this archive effort may be legally problematic and shut down the site days early, stating:

I'm told there was this Internet archival team that wants to make historical copy of our .torrent files, I'm honoured that people thinks our site is worthy of historical preservation, but the truth is about 95% of those .torrent files can be found off Google regardless and mostly have been indexed from other BitTorrent sites in the first place.

But, of course, as the Archive Team points out, it was never about saving those .torrent files, but rather all the metadata around them:

I think Gary might have misunderstood the purpose of the archiving project; he basically states that “the .torrent files can be found elsewhere too” – but this completely misses the point, being the archiving of the metadata *around* those torrents, such as user comments. These cannot be replicated from other sources…

The team apparently to get about 242 gigs of data, but there was a lot more that they missed. That's too bad.

those .torrent files can be found off Google regardless and mostly have been indexed from other BitTorrent sites in the first place

Or, to put it bluntly, the MAFIAA achieved absolutely nothing with this 'victory' and while they were busy with a single bigger fish heaps of alternatives sprung including decentralized networks (ie: you can search for torrents via the cloud in bittorrent already). Shall we send a Golden Turd to Mr Dodd as congratulations on his imaginary success?

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I was busy running the Archive Warrior while I slept. When I woke up the next morning, it said it couldn't connect to the site. It wasn't until I read Torrentfreak that I realized that the site had closed early.

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"Not trying to troll, but what kind of "Important Historical Information" would IsoHunt have anyway?"

How important could someones diary from WWII Germany be? The problem with history is that we don't know what's important until it's passed. So the archive team grabs all the public data it can so that history can decide what's important and what isn't.

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Comments for one thing. Just because you don't see a use NOW, doesn't mean there won't ever be. If the archive had been completed, it would have been of some historical importance. Imagine a hundred years from now, history/IT students learning about P2P sites and how their users thought and wrote.

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We didn't salvage every piece of rubble from WWII, right?

I get your point, but, frankly, preserving the entirety of IsoHunt seems to be a pointless exercise. At some point, you're going to have to decide what to preserve: what has actual historic significance, and what doesn't.

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I'm guessing the same team of people employed by the MPAA that get to write the laws will be very happy to provide this service for future historians. They'll tell them exactly what the users thought and wrote.

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If you were to go to IsoHunt, would you go there to read eloquent discourses on the merits of various aspects of Intellectual Property legislation, or would you go there to get the torrents?

My point is that, most likely, you would go there for the torrents, meaning that the only thing of value IsoHunt had were the torrents, (and possibly any metadata related to the torrents which would most likely not be publicly available).

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A student a hundred years from now learning that Isohunt users were more or less complete idiots and whose only conversation revolved around the usage of the torrents is still of some historical and educational value. Archiving the comments would be a primary source; whereas articles like this one would be secondary sources at best. Imagine being that student, reading this very article and wishing you had access to the Isohunt comments so you could verify if what we here are talking about is true.

A student a 100 years from now might think it rather backwards that the how-tos were not revealed within the post. In the future it is very possible that all computers might be standardized to where if you learned it one time, no more times were necessary for different machines.

It would have nothing to do with the posts as far as deep philosophical meanings go other than to state the level of technology of the time.

That's not exactly something most would think important to save until it occurred. It could easily be something else. Society and mores change from period to period. That's why you archive data because you never know what will be important.

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"A history of seeds, peers and downloads?"

Re-read the article. User comments seem to be the most important thing they were trying to get to, along with other information valuable as metadata. While data on the popularity of files might still be important (especially when showing data on non-infringing material), that doesn't seem to be what was important to archive.

This is what was being attempted before the shutdown. While ISOHunt was a going concern, the archive wasn't so important and presumably the only people legally able to copy the site would be ISOHunt themselves - and most people wouldn't bother keeping an archive of such a site for commercial reasons. Now that it's needed for historical record, the value and scope of backups have changed.

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The problem is that it's impossible to actually know what's going to be of historical significance and what isn't. The stuff from antiquity with the greatest historical value tends to be the garbage dumps.

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Do you know whats in the metadata, and what its used for?

Torrent metadeta, specifically comments and feedback, ratings etc, are the best and often ONLY way of knowing which of the dozens of like-named torrents you get from search results are not malware, fakes..., i.e garbage.

Isohunt had one of , if not the biggest, most reliable database of comments and feedback of any torrent site Ive seen. To my knowledge only Pirate bay even comes close.